I Am Fish

I Am Fish puts you in control of four different fish - a goldfish, a flying fish, a piranha, and a swordfish - each ripped from their pet shop tank and attempting to reunite by navigating the human world in increasingly precarious water containers. The core loop involves keeping your fish alive (read: wet) while rolling bowls down hills, launching through the air, and chomping through obstacles. It is the kind of premise that sounds immediately delightful in a trailer and reveals its friction only once you are thirty minutes in and have restarted the same segment for the eighth time. As a physics-driven platformer-sim hybrid, the game leans hard into momentum and container control. Each fish handles differently: the goldfish rolls its bowl across surfaces and must manage momentum like a marble on a tilted table, while the flying fish catches air currents in a way that feels genuinely novel for about twenty minutes. The piranha gets to bite and chomp through certain materials, giving it a more aggressive playstyle. On paper this variety sounds like strong design. In practice the physics engine is the game's biggest strength and its most consistent source of irritation. Precision is hard to achieve, checkpoints are sometimes stingy, and the line between a clever physics puzzle and an annoying jank-fest is crossed more often than the developers probably intended. The presentation deserves credit. Bossa Studios built a bright, suburban world that sells the absurdity of a goldfish in a bowl careening through a grocery store. The humor is gentle and visual rather than written, which keeps it accessible. But the audience here is narrow. This is not a game for people who want deep systems or meaningful progression. There is no build variety, no difficulty scaling to speak of, and the campaign is short enough that the credits arrive before the mechanics ever fully mature. Players who bounced off Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy due to punishing restart loops will find similar energy here, minus the philosophical voiceover and with considerably more fish. From a sim-and-strategy angle, there is almost nothing to analyze in terms of depth. Decision-making is moment-to-moment and physical rather than systemic. The AI is not a factor - this is a single-player puzzle experience with no opponent logic to evaluate. There is no mod ecosystem to speak of. The tutorial is light but the mechanics are simple enough that it rarely matters. What you see in the first level is essentially what the game offers throughout: keep the fish wet, manage the physics, reach the next checkpoint. If that loop clicks for you, the runtime is pleasant. If it does not, there is little underneath to hold your attention. Mixed reviews on Steam reflect a real divide. Some players find the concept charming enough to forgive the jank; others hit a frustrating segment and never recover their goodwill. It is worth knowing going in that this is a short, light, physics-toybox experience dressed up as an adventure game. It is not trying to be grand strategy, and it is not trying to be a roguelite. It is trying to make you laugh while a goldfish rolls into traffic. Whether that is enough depends entirely on your tolerance for slippery controls and occasional checkpoint cruelty.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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